"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

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Soldiers newly arrived “in-country” learned that South Vietnamese civilians were often Vietcong or Vietcong sympathizers, and they naturally began to ask themselves why the South Vietnamese should be saved from an enemy with which they were in such obvious sympathy. Even worse, there was no training, or, for that matter, no accurate method for telling the difference between friend and foe, a circumstance that greatly increased the American soldier’s anxiety and suspicion towards his supposed allies.61 While the obstinate silence of the civilians whom the troops were supposed to be protecting was an important advantage enjoyed by the NLF (Vietcong), it was a source of constant frustration to the American soldiers trying to glean information about its intentions, whereabouts, and movements.

Given these circumstances, the veterans who emerged from this war were, in a number of important ways, unlike those of previous wars. There was a high rate of desertion. For those men who had terminated their tours, as many as 70,000 suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), a condition that in previous wars had been known as “shell shock” or “combat fatigue.” In addition, material and psychological problems resulting from the shortage of jobs in a less responsive economy, as well as an often hostile civilian reception, made it more difficult for these returnees to readjust to civilian life. Citing one indicator of social and psychological maladjustment to civilian life, Walter Capps claims that there were as many suicides among veterans from 1975 to 1990 as combat deaths in the war itself.62

      For his part, Samuel Hynes has called the labeling of Vietnam veterans as victims one of the war’s necessary myths:

The story has been absorbed into the Vietnam story for the same reason that all war myths are accepted—because it gives events a comprehensible shape that is consistent with the myth of the war itself—the Bad War that was lost. Because the war was wrong, because children were killed and a country was devastated, men who fought there were devastated too.63

In support of his hypothesis of the myth of the veteran-victim, Hynes goes on to quote statistics showing that most men who went to Vietnam were not damaged by the experience and so their stories “have not entered the canon of Vietnam memoirs.”64 But one may legitimately ask how many men from this undamaged majority were actual combatants. Apart from the difficulty of assessing psychological damage, especially of men who do not overtly complain of it, the acceptance by veterans of their experience is perhaps true of any war, but it is also true that a great many Americans who fought in World War II and were supported by virtually the entire nation were also psychologically damaged—more, in fact, than were actually killed.

Many people, including veterans of earlier wars, have scorned the Vietnam vets as “losers” and “crybabies,” but the distress of these men was real and may partly be explained by the unique circumstances of the war. Psychological research has shown that killing in war actually causes more distress than the fear of being killed or seeing other men killed. General S.L.A. Marshall, the US Army’s chief military historian during World War II, found that the majority of men in combat did not even fire their weapons: “Fear of killing, rather than being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote in his influential study Men Against Fire (1947), citing cultural upbringing and religious education against the taking of human life as the cause.65

Marshall’s findings were incorporated by the US Army into new training techniques to teach soldiers how to perceive their enemies as “targets” rather than as people and therefore be more willing to fire upon them. Trainees were also taught to fire at an area target like bushes or clumps of trees, rather than recognizable individuals, a technique facilitated by the newer, fully automatic weapons.66 The revised training regime was successful: by the time of the Vietnam War, as many as 90% of the men were firing their weapons. The technical success, however, had a psychological price: a study of veterans (1999) found that soldiers who had killed, or believed they had killed, people in combat had higher rates of P.T.S.D.67

Another way of making soldiers more willing to kill their declared enemies is through demonization, a technique that is more effective when dealing with a racial “other.” The Japanese during World War II, for example, were represented in propaganda as sub-human and so especially worthy of being killed. The Vietnamese enemy were subject to similar perceptions: dehumanizing epithets such as “gooks,” “dinks,” “slopes” and the like were routinely used among soldiers (as can be constantly seen in the fictional literature), and, like the Japanese in the former war, the Vietnamese enemy was seen as treacherous and fanatical, but there may be other cultural factors at work here that go beyond prejudice and racism. Jonathan Shay sees the roots of the demonization of the enemy in Biblical texts, using as illustration I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath, which he argues shows David’s lack of respect for his enemy. Shay’s contrasts this Biblical text with the duel of Hector and Ajax, in Homer’s Iliad, where neither warrior shows disrespect for the other.68

A great deal of blame has been assigned to American soldiers for morally despicable acts committed in Vietnam. The mother of Paul Meadlo, one of the men who participated in the My Lai massacre, is said to have complained: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer”. Meadlo was ordered by his platoon leader, Lt. Calley, to open fire on a group of civilians, and they both stood about ten feet from the victims, blazing away on full automatic: “It was pure carnage, with heads shot off along with limbs…” After a few minutes, Meadlo was emotionally unable to continue. Only a few children who had been protected by their mothers remained alive, but “Calley opened fire again, killing them one by one.”69

      Without exculpating Calley, who led the massacre, or the men who followed him (some of them refused), it should be more widely understood that, historically, evil has been perpetrated by every army upon both POWs and civilians in virtually every war. In World War II, atrocities committed by American soldiers remained unknown to the general public because reports and images of such acts were censored by the government propaganda apparatus, which, in the absence of television cameras and independent reporting, was more effective in controlling images and information from battle zones.

It is also noteworthy that the GIs in Vietnam have assumed a greater share of responsibility for their actions than veterans of previous wars, a point that becomes clear when one compares the fiction and memoirs of the two world wars with those of Vietnam. In his discussion of Larry Heinemann’s novel Close Quarters (1977), in which the characters engage in atrocities, Tobey C. Herzog asks if the responsibility for such acts belongs to the individuals, what he calls “the evil within,” or the war environment, “the evil without.” He concludes that the issue is evaded in this novel as well as in others, but adds that “evidence in Heinemann’s novel points toward an environmental cause.”70 Cornelius Cronin has argued in his discussion of atrocities that, contrary to the external cause theory, in this particular aspect the Vietnam veterans may be differentiated from their counterparts in earlier wars:

There is a clear sense that evil and good are inextricably mixed in war, and that soldiers must see themselves as individuals capable of acting and therefore capable of performing evil actions. World War I and II soldiers tended to see themselves as passive, as being acted upon by the war and their societies.71

      There is a consensus among commentators that another important reason for the distress